Money Wheel

She was waiting for my friend and I. Medium height, hair pulled back in a ponytail, she adjusted her plastic-framed glasses and gave us a broad smile as we both sat down opposite her at the Indian diner.

My friend and I were prepared. Since the meeting was inevitable, we braced ourselves for the onslaught. And just like any hopeful recruiter, she was eager, motivated and dead-set on the belief that her internet business program would pave her way to financial freedom.

Sometime in the middle of the meeting her story disgorged – she still retained her corporate day job while trying to build a business to support her ageing parents and siblings. Her weekdays are spent working long hours and weekends occupied with business meetings. Commendable. I am surprised that after 4 million similar stories she still had my full attention. Actually, it was more of feeling sad for her.

My friend reckoned that it is “the system of this world” that’s the root of all these problems. She was reading Exodus, the part where Aaron and Moses approached the Egyptian pharaoh and asked for a 3-day reprieve for the Israelite slaves to make sacrifices to God. But the request backfired and the pharaoh was like, hey let’s make these lazy Israelites do more work, since they are paying attention to all these lies about sacrifice.

Are people hamsters? Trapped running on a tyrannical money-wheel that screams faster, faster, faster? How much productivity is enough? How much money is enough?

Sigh.

The brainwashing continues…Outdo! Outsell! Outrun! Out-think! Very soon it would be lights out, kiddo. And our lives would have accounted for little more than just having existed to make up the numbers.

Never had contentment been that elusive. Never had it been more needed.